The worst part about this is that all this positivity is coming from absolutely delusional metrics. There have been a bunch of “look how much our per capita GHG emissions have declined in the last decade” figures floating around social media recently, and they’re totally untethered from reality. Most of these projections are based on taking emissions offset programs at face value–based, that is, on assuming that all the companies claims of “net zero” on the basis of planting trees or other offset programs really have reduced their emissions by the amount claimed.

Unfortunately, virtually every single one of those programs is bullshit. Carbon offsets are uniquely susceptible to grifting because they have a really fucked up incentive structure that encourages everyone involved to either lie or look the other way about lies. Because of the complexity associated with monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) of these programs, we mostly rely on offset programs to self-report their work, and then “spot check” MRV compliance. Companies have an obvious incentive to lie here: playing up (or outright fabricating) their offset work lets them charge more and, in places with things like cap & trade policies in place, make even more money selling carbon credits.

What’s less obvious is that regulatory bodies also have an incentive to lie about MRV success. The relevant contrast case is tax evasion. Even if I have an incentive to lie about my taxes in order to get away with paying less, the government (at least in theory) has an incentive to catch and stop me, since every dollar of tax liability I avoid is a dollar they don’t get: it’s a zero-sum game. MRV evasion isn’t like that. Instead of having an incentive to catch me, regulatory bodies also have an incentive to lie, or at least to not work very hard at trying to catch me lying. If the government lets (say) ExxonMobil get away with claiming more effective (or real) offsets than they actually implemented, they’re not losing anything. In fact, they actually come out ahead: they get to claim that companies in their control are meeting their legal and treaty-based obligations, which is a huge diplomatic and PR win.

The end result of this is that official GHG emissions estimates have come totally untethered from reality. Governments are touting reports and projections showing how much better we’re all doing, and how on track we are to solve this problem. Meanwhile, the actual empirical measurements of GHG content of the atmosphere continues to increase monotonically, and the effects of climate change get worse every month. We’re in our 11th consecutive month of temperature record breaking worldwide, but everyone is telling us to be optimistic. This looks super puzzling until you realize that it’s all just based on the big lie of carbon offsets that we’re all telling ourselves and each other. We’re going to grift ourselves right into the apocalypse.